the patron saint of metalworkers, is trapped by the strictures of his class. Hired as a laborer by British gentry, he is shamed and excited by finding the intellectual fulfillment he aspires to in the Colebrook home, not his own.
So different, Catherine and Eligius are twinned in torment. She loves her old and failing husband, her moody daughter, and her lonely young son, yet all of them impede her obsession. Eligius is duty-bound to his widowed mother and ailing baby sister; his father’s comrades urge him to rob his employers, the usurpers of his nation.
Still, his relationship with the Colebrooks deepens, and the bigotry of the oppressed cannot survive. Catherine’s beautiful daughter, Julia, becomes Eligius’ confidant. He sees that Catherine’s husband, “the old lion,” despite his upbringing, brings on his own ruin trying to do the right thing. The British matron, raised to a famous reserve, invests photography with a holy power. The separate peace, however, has a price. Catherine is an outcast, Eligius a traitor. Yet their photographs draw more attention, and attract more and more patrons, when, at virtually the same moment, the tide of armed revolution breaks over Ceylon.
Rocklin’s is a bold landscape, against which an intimate drama is poignantly played out. The Luminist recalls Out of Africa, and Karen Blixen’s bond with her house manager, Farah, from whom she learns how little she can control, but their relationship is not in vain. It comprises a doom made glorious, a failure in the midst of grandeur, a loss imbued with hope.
Just in this way, our minds recall in every detail the photo snapped at the moment of pain, while all the lovely scenes seem to run together.
1.
Ceylon, from whatever direction it may be approached, unfolds a scene of loveliness and grandeur unsurpassed, if it be rivaled, by any land. The Brahmans designated it by the epithet of Lanka, the resplendent, and in their dreamy rhapsodies extolled it as the region of mystery.
SIR JAMES EMERSON TENNANT
Ceylon: An Account of the Island, Vol. I, 1859
Must we always object to science, that it leads its servants to doubt the immortal soul? No, this is my prayer: enlighten my mind so that I may be enabled to see more clearly the illuminations of mortal Man, and behind it, the immortal Light.
SIR JOHN HOLLAND
Preliminary Discourse on a New Mechanism of Portraiture, 1835
Imagine, arresting beauty at the very moment beauty comes into being and passes out of the world. Imagine if life could be held still.
Letter from Catherine Colebrook to Sir John Holland
February 22, 1836
The End of This
THE NOISES OUTSIDE HER WINDOW WERE OF WIND AND the near sea, of clay chimes kilned to crystalline tones. Natives not opposed to Britishers had strung them at odd heights from the thatching of her bungalow roof to ward off demons during her pregnancy. Their sound filled her sleep and informed her dreams.
Ewen and Hardy nestled against her still-swollen midsection. Before, when the pains of labor had ruled her, this would have filled her heart.
She took her babies into her arms and bundled them. Folding the letter carefully, she brought them to the carriage and placed them next to her. At the flick of her reins, the old bay stumbled into motion.
She gazed at her newly-arrived sons and tried not to think of the future.
THE RIDETO the Maclears’ home in Table Bay was not ritual, yet her passage through the Cape of Good Hope’s sifting littorals possessed equal weight and hollowness. She struggled to think of the right word for this, her second foray along the sea path to the lonely Dutch outpost of stone imposing itself on the African sky.
Her sons jostled alongside her. She wanted simply to place the letter in Sir John Holland’s hand and leave, and be whoever it was that she would be tomorrow.
When the bend in the road opened onto the sea’s turquoise at the mouth of Agulhas, she thought of Sir John’s lecture. That night at the Maclears’ he’d marveled at how the Cape marked the place where a man traveling from the equator ceases traveling southward and begins traveling eastward without ever having changed direction. The world changes without changing. Wondrous, he’d said, his shock of white hair a cloud above his face.
The world is capable of such things, she thought.
The road was rutted. Ewen cried out. Catherine brought her children close and told them that they traveled over the same dirt and lichens, past the same protea, as the Voortrekkers who fled the sea to escape the